No one would ever believe her.
She wrote her mom a letter.
She said everything she’d wanted to say in the last six months.
She said she was sorry.
She begged her to think of Ben and Mouse – and Maisie.
She threatened to call the police.
Her Aunt Susan gave her a stamp. ‘They’re in the junk drawer, Eleanor, take as many as you need.’
Park
When he got sick of his bedroom, when there was nothing left in his life that smelled like vanilla – Park walked by Eleanor’s house.
Sometimes the truck was there,
sometimes
it
wasn’t,
sometimes the Rottweiler was asleep on the porch. But the broken toys were gone, and there were never any strawberry-blond kids playing in the yard.
Josh said that Eleanor’s little brother had stopped coming to school. ‘Everybody says they’re gone. The whole family.’
‘That great news,’ their mother said. ‘Maybe that pretty mom wake up to bad situation, you know? Good for Eleanor.’
Park just nodded.
He wondered if his letters even got to wherever she was now.
Eleanor There was a red rotary phone in the spare bedroom. Her bedroom.
Whenever it rang, Eleanor felt like picking it up and saying, ‘What is it, Commissioner Gordon?’
Sometimes, when she was alone in the house, she took the phone over to her bed and listened to the dial tone.
She practiced Park’s number, her finger sliding across the dial.
Sometimes, after the dial tone stopped, she pretended he was whispering in her ear.
‘Have you ever had a boyfriend?’
Dani asked. Dani was in theater camp, too. They ate lunch together, sitting on the stage with their legs dangling in the orchestra pit.
‘No,’ Eleanor said.
Park wasn’t a boyfriend, he was a champion.
And they weren’t going to break up. Or get bored. Or drift apart. (They weren’t going to become
another
stupid
high
school romance.) They were just going to stop.
Eleanor had decided back in his dad’s truck. She’d decided in Albert Lea, Minnesota. If they weren’t going to get married – if it wasn’t forever – it was only a matter of time.
They were just going to stop.
Park was never going to love her more than he did on the day they said goodbye.
And she couldn’t bear to think of him loving her less.
Park
When he got sick of himself, Park went to her old house. Sometimes the truck was there. Sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes, Park stood at the end of the sidewalk and hated everything the house stood for.
CHAPTER 56
Eleanor
Letters, postcards, packages that rattled like loaded cassette tapes.
None of them opened, none of them read.
‘Dear Park,’ she wrote on a clean sheet of stationery. ‘Dear Park,’ she tried to explain.
But the explanations fell apart in her hands. Everything true was too hard to write – he was too much to lose. Everything she felt for him was too hot to touch.
‘I’m sorry,’ she wrote, then crossed it out.
‘It’s just …’ she tried again.
She threw the half-written letters away. She threw the unopened envelopes in the bottom drawer.
‘Dear Park,’ she whispered, her forehead hanging over the dresser, ‘just stop.’
Park
His dad said Park needed a summer job to pay for gas.
Neither of them mentioned that Park never went anywhere.
Or that he’d started putting eyeliner on with his thumb.
Blacking out his own eyes.
He
looked
just
wrecked
enough to get a job at Drastic Plastic. The girl who hired him had two rows of holes in each ear.
His mom stopped bringing in the mail. He knew it was because she hated telling him that nothing had come for him. Park brought in the mail himself now every night when he got home from work. Every night praying for rain.
He had an endless supply and an insatiable appetite for punk music. ‘I can’t hear myself think in here,’ his dad said, coming into Park’s room for the third night in a row to turn down the stereo.
Duh, Eleanor would have said.
Eleanor didn’t start school in the fall. Not with Park anyway.
She didn’t celebrate the fact that juniors don’t have to take gym. She didn’t say, ‘Unholy union, Batman,’ when Steve and Tina eloped over Labor Day.
Park had written her a letter all about it. He’d told her everything that happened, and everything that didn’t, every day since she’d left.
He kept writing her letters months after he stopped sending them. On New Year’s Day, he wrote that he hoped she’d get everything she ever wished for.
Then he tossed the letter into a box under his bed.
CHAPTER 57
Park
He’d stopped trying to bring her back.
She only came back when she felt like it anyway, in dreams and lies and broken-down déjà vu.
Like, Park would be driving to work and he’d see a girl with red hair standing on the street, and he’d swear for half an airless moment that it was her.
Or he’d wake up when it was still dark, sure that she was waiting for him outside. Sure that she needed him.